I was one of the backers of Haunts at the $5 tier and didn't ask for a refund. I've backed a lot of Kickstarter campaigns aware that this kind of outcome was eventually expected to happen for a percentage of them. I am also currently studying project management in college where a whole part of the curriculum is explaining how software projects fail.

There is still some hope that this game could be saved and I am watching this story unfold carefully. It is the first real case of a funded project from the Video Games category that has admitted things have gone disasterously wrong. How the project creators react to this situation, like how they offered refunds, will provide a precedent for the next imploded project to look to for guidance.

An odd design decision was that Haunts was being coded with the relatively young Go programming language, which is making it more difficult to find a replacement programmer or outsource. Poking around what files the developer made public on github, it looks like the artificial intelligence was scripted in Lua and (As a fan of Lua) that makes me wonder why they didn't just make more of the game with Lua rather than Go.http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Go_(programming_language)http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lua_(programming_language)

Here are two thing that I have recently developed some concerns about for the backers community on Kickstarter.

First, I have seen posts about people that aren't in good financial situations that are still scraping together hundred dollar pledges for multiple campaigns. I prefer to back at a basic tier and then might raise my pledge later after giving it some thought. Impulse buying big rewards can become very expensive very fast. There are some games I have just pledged $1 for now and wait for them to go on sale after launch (Like being in a Humble Bundle). As others have said before, don't pledge what you can't afford to lose.

Second, I've seen posts about how some people have become addicts to browsing and commenting on Kickstarter. I've seen profiles for backers that only backed a few campaigns yet have made over 200?300 comments. I am also seeing more profiles with over 200 projects backed (The highest I've seen is a backer of 1301 projects). Looking at some of those profiles, I would say that Kickstarter addicts are willing to back some of the riskiest projects and could lose a lot if we start seeing a lot of projects start failing to deliver.

What always gets me is how people will pledge like $5 and go haywire if the project doesn't pan out. Either that, or they're quick to call it a "scam" which is so silly. Crowd-funding has opened up to the public what used to be closed, and that's the ability for the public to decide what gets released instead of the big corporations making all the decisions. But with that, we see a lot of the stupidity of the average consumer emerging (i.e. complaining after losing a tiny pledge, or not understanding how projects work).

Some of the things I've seen get funding are so lame it really surprises me. Some things I've seen didn't even make sense, like, the projects weren't even explained enough to make sense. Yet, it somehow got hundreds of thousands of dollars or more. I've also seen great projects get little or nothing.

I'm not quite sure what lesson I should learn from it? The sentence kind of implies that you are going to buy something. But you don't buy, you invest in a project. And investment always takes risks. There is no guaranty. What happened to Haunts is more or less what happens everyday behind closed doors. Now that the average consumer can become an investor, this part also becomes public notice. That's all.

To be honest, the backers of Haunts are lucky that they were offered a refund. There was no legal need to do so. As hard as it may sound.

[QUOTE=tulamide] I'm not quite sure what lesson I should learn from it? The sentence kind of implies that you are going to buy something. But you don't buy, you invest in a project. And investment always takes risks. There is no guaranty. What happened to Haunts is more or less what happens everyday behind closed doors. Now that the average consumer can become an investor, this part also becomes public notice. That's all.

To be honest, the backers of Haunts are lucky that they were offered a refund. There was no legal need to do so. As hard as it may sound.[/QUOTE]

The good thing if you're a game developer, there no reason to learn the lesson because you can finish the project with your own intention.

The project leader has no knowledge in programming, so he could abandon the project and refund to the backers.